One of the features of current year America is the occurrence of panics, particularly among the managerial elite. The most recent is the White Fright, where the media is hysterically reporting every disturbance as the act of white supremacists. This panic appears to have been triggered by the El Paso shooting, but it is a manifestation of a much longer occurring paranoia among the managerial classes. It dates back to at least the last presidential election and has roots in the Obama years.

The underlying assumption of the White Fright is a belief that whites are secretly organizing to overthrow the current order and impose some sort of pale patriarchy on the country. These white supremacists are everywhere and look just like normal everyday white people, so any white person could possibly be one of them. These people can, at any moment, turn into a violent spree killer, if exposed to certain kinds of content called “hate speech” which is found on-line.

The similarities to medieval witch hunting are too obvious not to notice. The adversary is not something that appears in material form. Like Old Scratch, white supremacy is an evil spirit that works through the infected. Once under the control of white supremacy, the person no longer has agency. Not surprisingly, like the accused witches in Salem, the modern white supremacist is most likely to be someone that vexes the moral authorities, either by their presence or by their actions.

Now, many on the Right have been conditioned to look at this stuff and come up with an explanation that makes the Left seem less nutty. For example, Steve Sailer will argue it is a clever ploy to rally the coalition of the ascendant. The National Review types will claim it is a ploy to conceal the fact that Democrats are the real racists. These are conditioned responses that are not intended to explain what’s going on with the Left, but to fit it into the normal Left-Right dynamic that describes America politics.

A more nuanced explanation is that the White Fright is part of a great fear that is sweeping the managerial classes. Like that which swept France in the summer of 1789, this fear is rooted in both the economic and the social problems of society. There’s also a paranoia about the ruling class. These people are riddled with angst and fear of being dropped from the managerial class. This causes them to be highly sensitive to any disruption in society and as a result, they are prone to panics.

The media, internet censors, social justice warriors and corporate HR departments are the servants of the ruling class. As such, they are wholly dependent upon them for their status with regards to the rest of us. Unlike the commoners, who are only vaguely aware that there are powerful people behind the political theater, the managerial class is much more aware of this reality. As a result, they live like the peasants of France, keenly aware they are dependent upon people they cannot trust.

This anxiety manifests itself as panics about imaginary villains plotting to topple the existing order. The Russia hoax is a good example. It is assumed that the people peddling it did so for cynical reasons and that may be true. The people spreading and repeating it, however, were motivated by a genuine fear of dark forces working in the shadows against their interests. Marianne Williamson got a lot of attention in the last debate by mentioning “dark psychic forces.” It resonated with certain people.

Now, another possible explanation for the White Fright is that something similar to what happened in Salem is going on in current year America. At the end of the 17th century, what amounted to a Puritan theocracy, had taken root in New England. Everything about social life was controlled by the religious sensibilities of the people, mostly enforced by a narrow theocratic elite. The form and purpose of New England towns was based in the religious understanding of the people we now call Puritans.

This model, when facing the challenge of witch panics, was unable to adapt and cope with the phenomenon. The response from the religious authorities decreased public trust and eroded their authority. The trials themselves, instead of reducing fear among the panicked, increased suspicions. Before long it became obvious that the religious authorities were as much a part of the problem as the people making accusations and spreading rumors. The witch trials discredited Puritanism.

That could be what is happening in current year America. The similarities between modern Progressivism and Puritanism, in its manifestations, not theologically, is hard not to notice. Everything from vinegar drinking scolds to their effeminate male enablers are present in modern day Progressivism. Current year America is ruled by a bizarre identity cult that is every bit as superstitious as the Puritans. The White Fright may turn out to be the witch scares of late empire America.

Those are all the amusing and gratuitous explanations for what we are seeing. There is another possibility and that is a genuine fear rooted in real danger. The response by the managerial class may seem hysterical and irrational, but maybe that is just a byproduct of mass media culture. Maybe there is a real threat. The people running from the monster, shrieking like madmen, are not acting rationally, but their fear is not irrational either. The monster is real and is a real danger to them.

It should be noted that panic is not the default response to disasters or dangers. In things like fires, natural disasters and combat, panic is not typical. Instead, mutual aid is the most common response. An obvious example is the response of the people in the World Trade Center buildings during 9/11. Among the stories of great heroism were stories of incredible cooperation. People came together and helped one another get out of the buildings. Mutual aid and cooperation was the natural response.

Rather than a panic or mass hysteria, the White Fright may be a call to familiarity and mutual aid by the managerial class. The old political order is breaking down, as the inevitable consequences of multiculturalism manifest. What we could be seeing is a primal call for social re-attachment. The primary purveyors of the White Fright are white, or at least white presenting. The old good-white coalition is rallying around the fear of white supremacy, in defense of what is lurking outside the walls.

Of course, all of these possible explanations for the panics we are seeing are rooted in the general sense that society is fragmenting. That’s because current year America is fragile and possibly ready to shatter. The old political order is in decline and the rise of identity politics promises to replace it. These panics are as much about the fear of what comes next as superstition or immediate threats. The White Fright may one day be seen as the turning point in the rise of white identity politics.

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In the 1990’s, it was popular for conservatives to excuse their impotence by throwing around the line, “In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve”, which they attributed to Tocqueville. So-called conservatives like Newt Gingrich were supposed to be idea men, brimming with technocratic solutions to every problem, while Clinton was a windy degenerate from a bygone era. The fact that the voters sided with Clinton over conservatives reflected poorly on the people.

The quote, of course, was not from Tocqueville. It was actually Joseph de Maistre, who coined that phrase. It was oddly symbolic of the state of conservatism. They had turned their back on everything that defined Western conservatism by that point, so forgetting seminal figures in the intellectual tradition of the Right was appropriate. In retrospect, the fact that the so-called conservatives did not understand the word “people” in the context of the quote was the most poignant error.

Putting that aside, the quote itself is a nice shorthand for the actual truth that lies behind those words. The people get the ruling elite they can produce and that ruling elite will then create a government that reflects its nature. The condition of the people is reflected in the morality of its ruling class. At the same time, the ruling class is responsible for the people. Its duty is to advance their interests. In this way, the pivot point of a people is its ruling class. It is what they make of it.

The founding generation of America were men of civic virtue. The saw the willingness to put the interests of the community ahead of private interests, as the threshold item for a leader. As a result, they rejected the monarchical system of government they inherited from England and created a republic. The constitutional system they created was based on the assumption that, in general, the sort of men who would rise to prominence were men who prized civic virtue. The Constitution reflected this.

That turned out to be the fatal flaw of the constitutional order created in Philadelphia two centuries ago. While the system of checks and balances worked to prevent the ambitious and unscrupulous from gaining politician power, it was not built for the ruling elite that would evolve in the 19th century. When the North conquered the country, America became a nascent empire. It still reflected the founding order, but its elite was now changing to reflect the changing nature of America.

The ruling elite the evolved after the Civil War and into the Industrial Revolution did not place civic virtue at the top of its moral order. Instead, it was the desire for and the love of honor that motivated the ruling classes. They quickly reorganized the government to reflect this reality. Rank and status were now the coin of the realm. Whether it was dominating some area of the economy or conquering foreign lands, the path to attaining rank and status was though government and politcs.

You can see this in the type of men who occupied high office. Before the Civil War, the leadership of the country were men who either got rich before entering government, or they were born rich. This was the result of a natural ruling class that reflected the human capital of the people. After the war, there emerged men who made their names in government. Their path to high status was not as natural leaders of their community, but as shrewd operators in the political system.

The obvious example is Abraham Lincoln, who is treated as the Moses of the second founding by the previous ruling class. This was not a man who prized civic virtue or was a natural community leader. Instead, he craved status and power. He attained those through the skillful maneuvering through politics and then through the brutal use of force to create a political order that reflected this new ruling class. For those who wonder when America will have its Sulla, look no further than Lincoln.

Every phase of an elite runs its course and this one is no different. The ruling class that evolved after the Civil War through the Cold War was built for a different age. It was industrial and it was geared to a world of industrial competition. What kept it going long after its peak was the Cold War. The stand-off with communism not only locked the New Deal political order in place, it locked in place the status system of the ruling elite. That system, thirty years after the Cold War, is now giving way to something new.

The technological age, like the industrial age, is the accelerant for a long overdue transformation of the American ruling elite. This new class is no longer created and housed within the political class. It exists outside of it, within its own power centers inside and outside of government. The intelligence services, for example, are now an independent power center, beyond the reach of Congress. Silicon Valley and Wall Street are now more powerful than Washington.

This new ruling class has a unique motivation. The elite of the republic was defined by civic virtue. The elite of the empire was defined by status and rank. This new ruling elite will be defined by the fear it instills in the public. In the technological age, fear of the oligarchs will be the supreme public virtue. Fear will be ruthlessly and creatively inculcated by a ruling elite that is wholly disconnected from the people over whom it rules. This stage of America will be the age of technological despotism.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The nature of all human society is that there is an elite that sits atop the society, providing both order and structure to the whole. Because the apple does not fall far from the tree, elites tend to be inherited. The sons and daughters of the ruling class make up the next generation’s ruling class. In Guatemala, for example, a small number of families have controlled the country since the 16th century. Despite what the science deniers will tell you, biology is a real thing and it matters.

In the West, this biological reality has been tempered by an understanding that men of merit can be found in the lower ranks. Cultural pathways evolved for these men to earn their way into the elite. Originally this meant warfare. A great warrior and leader of men could earn his way into the elite. Some of the great aristocratic names of England, for example, were founded by the sword in The Hundred Years War. Later, intellectual and economic prowess became pathways to high status.

Now, in the Middle Ages, as Europe settled into a patchwork of ethnic groups, those pathways were shutoff for people outside the dominant ethnicity. Most obviously, Jews were blocked from holding high offices or ruling over Christians. In the late Roman Empire and into the early Middle Ages, these prohibitions did not exist, so there were very powerful Jews in what is now Italy, Spain and France. They often played a major role in the succession of kings and the naming of bishops.

What came to be the norm in Eurasia is that the ruling elite was biologically of the people over whom it ruled. In the case of conquered people, their elites operated like vassals, reporting to the elite that ruled over them. This is the naturally occurring nationalism that Yoram Hazony promotes for his people. Jews rule over Jewish lands and Jewish people for the good of the Jewish people. Those minority populations that happen to be in the way must sublimate themselves to the interests of Israel.

This is not the model everywhere. In most of the Middle East, a small minority will rule over the rest. The Alawites rule over the much larger tribes in Syria. In Iraq under Saddam Hussein, his tribe, al-Begat, ruled over the rest. His tribe was also of the much smaller Sunni sect. In fact, the history of the Middle East, going back to the classic period, is the story of small groups gaining control over large areas of diverse people, who outnumber their new rulers by significant margins.

South America is another model where the naturally occurring nationalism of Eurasia does not prevail. Throughout South America, the ruling class is very European in appearance and custom. They sit atop a large mixed race population that is often tribal, regional and multilingual. Look at the political elite of these countries and they are very white. In contrast, look at their populations and they resemble what the American Left imagines for Ohio one day. It’s biological feudalism.

This organizational system is why America is being overrun with migrants. In order for biological feudalism to work, the people at the top have to be able to feed and control the population. It’s why revolution has been a feature of South American politics since they broke free from Europe. One faction within the elite takes advantage of the other, by rallying some portion of the swarthy masses that are unhappy. Revolution is really just a family spat over control of the country.

It’s why everyone agrees Venezuela is a problem. There, the coalition of the swarthy actually took over country. You’ll note that in a group photo of South American leaders, Maduro is easy to spot. Granted, there’s a lot of oil and gas to be sucked out of the country by North America firms, but the reason the rest of South America has never embraced the Venezuelan leaders is they represent a threat to the biological feudalism that is the norm in South America.

In order to make biological feudalism work, the people at the top have to be homogeneous and they have to be ruthless. Settling political disputes within a narrow elite works when that narrow elite is what amounts to an extended family. This was what European feudalism relied upon to maintain order. If parts of the elite have loyalties that transcend that of the ruling elite, then fracture is inevitable. People will ruthlessly defend their own from outsiders. It is human nature.

That’s why this model is unlikely to work in America. The ruling elite is too diverse to operate like an extended family. Even in the Imperial Capital, where everyone knows everyone, outside loyalties loom large. At Yoram Hazony’s conference, many of the attendees see America as a resource center for their tribe’s war in the Levant. These are not people who will sacrifice for the good of America or the American elite. Their relationships in Washington are purely transactional.

That’s what you see happening with the Democrat Party. They want to be a coalition that is white presenting at the top, with maybe some token color, and the new coalition of the ascendant at the bottom. The trouble is, they seem to lack the willpower and ruthlessness to do it. They just purged leadership staff because they are too white. The tribes of the coalition don’t know their place and the only way they can know their place is if the ruling elite puts them in their place.

Most likely, the sort of system we will see in the post-national, majority-minority America is one ruled by narrow power centers. Silicon Valley will control the public space, but work with Wall Street, which controls the economy. The intelligence services, with their monopoly of force, will be another power center. These power centers will be controlled by a small number of clans. The farce of modern democracy will simply become a ritual that is managed by these power centers to their own advantage.

Whether or not this is possible is debatable. The dirty secret of South America is their organizational model was just an evolution of the colonial model, supported by North America and Europe. Pull away the support of the home culture and the natives most likely would have eaten their elites a long time ago. The South American system transplanted to North America, without external support, may just quickly devolve into chaos, warlordism and then old fashioned authoritarianism.

Support the media that supports you. While all of us toiling in the fields of dissident media are motivated by a sense of duty, having a place to sleep and food on the table still requires money. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I now have a PayPal setup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!

In modern usage, the word “cult” is entirely negative. It conjures the image of a strange religious group or maybe a charismatic madman claiming to be Jesus. In the former case, the group will have unusual beliefs, isolate themselves from the rest of society and maybe prepare for some prophesied event. Jim Jones or David Koresh are what comes to mind for most people in the latter case. Of course, there’s always the example of the suicide cult, which gave us the expression “pass the Kool-Aid.”

The word “cult” comes from the Latin word cultus, which meant the care owed to a deity, shrine or temple. In the ancient world, cults were common. They could be built around maintaining a particular shrine, which had been built for a deity, a great hero or even a legendary event. The people in the cult maintained the shrine and served the needs of pilgrims. The same was true of temples and even churches. In the ancient world, cults were just a normal part of everyday life.

This was true outside the Roman world, as well. For example, the Vikings did not have a word for what we would call religion. Instead, they had words to describe the public cult, to which everyone belonged, and words for the private cults that people maintained in their homes and villages. The public cult was what bound the people together with common rituals and celebrations, while the private cult was what held the family together. The concept of the household god, for example, was common.

This old idea of the cult is worth thinking about in the current age, as multiculturalism shatters traditional communities and the traditional customs of the people. Without something to organize people on the large scale, even a regional scale, something will inevitably organize them on the small scale. This was the traditional role of cults in the ancient world. They evolved locally to be local. Put another way, they were a local solution to a universal problem. They gave people purpose and meaning.

In modern America, as the shared national identity recedes, something will fill the void and most likely it will be something like the ancient concept of the cult. Of course, with the internet, local becomes a relative term. People of the same cult or subculture, can feel like they are close to one another, by participating is private on-line groups. These subcultures will become that which people primarily identify with in public. Another aspect of identity politics will be the many subcultures and cults that spring up.

Take for example the antisemitic community. It used to be that people who hated Jews were called anti-Semites. One could be an Episcopalian and be an anti-Semite. Not liking Jews was just one of many attributes to describe someone. Later, the term shifted to mean people who were hated by Jews. If Jews thought someone was a problem for the Jews, then they were described as an anti-Semite. The anti-Zionists, even the Jewish ones, are always called antisemitic, for example.

Today, some of that still holds, but antisemitism is much more complex now than just a dislike for Jews or Israel. Antisemitism is quickly becoming a unique and complex subculture with its own language, symbols and literature. Kevin McDonald was amusingly called the Karl Marx of antisemitism, but it is a good description. His three books on the Jews are now the foundation of a complex and sophisticated understanding of Jews and the people who have organized themselves around opposition to the Jews.

Of course, modern Judaism is evolving into cults as well. The Chabad movement, for example, has gone beyond being a weird orthodox subculture. It is now an international secret society with observation posts in every Western capital. They even have one of their guys in the White House. Zionism, as practiced by people like Ben Shapiro and Yoram Hazony, ticks all the boxes of a cult. Everything they touch is manipulated to fit into their worldview and the purpose of Zionism.

The subcultures evolving in regards to the Jews are just one type of cult that will probably be a feature of the coming age. Secular gurus like Jordan Peterson or Stephan Molyneux are going to become more common. It’s fair to say that both would have fit in well on the revival circuit back in the old days. Instead of healing people in tent revivals, they heal people on-line with therapeutic language. The multicultural future will be a new age of prophets and holy men, building communities around their teachings.

Now, America has never had a unifying culture. Regionalism and subcultures have been the defining feature of America since the founding. Civic nationalism, however, provided a universal framework within which all of these subcultures and regional identities could operate without generating social conflict. Much like the Vikings, America was a land with a public cult, civic nationalism and patriotism, and many private cults. You could be a southern redneck and a proud American at the same time.

That’s unlikely to be the future. For starters, the old system relied upon a primary loyalty to the national creed, even among the rich. That’s falling away, especially with the rich, who no longer have any loyalty to the people over whom they rule. Then there is the transparency of modern life. Mass communications means everyone can see how different everyone else is living, relative to their subculture. The Zionists and anti-Semites can follow one another in ways that were unimaginable decades ago.

The old line about familiarity breeding contempt will surely be true of the future. Because these evolving subcultures will know a lot about their competitors, they will evolve in opposition to them as well. You see this with what’s going on between the Zionists and the anti-Semites. They are growing in complexity, but also their animosity toward one another is becoming more complex. In the future, maintaining boundaries will be what matters, not finding ways to break down boundaries and cooperate.

Support the media that supports you. While all of us toiling in the fields of dissident media are motivated by a sense of duty, having a place to sleep and food on the table still requires money. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I now have a PayPal setup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!

If you were to transport into this age, someone from a prior age, say the 19th century, that person would certainly be amazed at what he saw. From the perspective of this age, the assumption is he would be most impressed with the technological advances relative to his time. The ability to easily communicate with people, from all over the globe, would probably be the most dazzling. Instead of waiting weeks for a letter from a friend, we exchange e-mails and texts instantly from wherever we happen to be standing.

People in the modern West tend to think of progress in purely material terms, so that would be the thing most people think of in this thought experiment. Our communication systems are better. Our transportation systems are better. Our food and entertainments are vastly more plentiful, if not necessarily better. It’s not unreasonable to think that 19th century man would marvel at a fast food drive through. To him, at least in a material sense, this age is beyond the world of fantasy.

Something else would probably stun 19th century man. That is the lack of human interaction compared to his time. This is one of those counter-intuitive things for people in this age, because this age is awash in communications. Everywhere you turn, the rulers are sending messages to you about the latest products you must consume or the most recently approved thoughts you should promote. Humans in this age are awash in mass media, which bombards us wherever we go.

When you look past that top layer, however, what you see is people “interfacing” with one another, but very few people bonding and interacting. Look at the typical customer service experience. You call and someone, from somewhere, responds to your prompts, using a script provided to them by the software in the call center. Increasingly, the customer service agent is a robot. Most people order their prescriptions, for example, from a robot, not a pharmacist. It is purely transactional.

This sterilization of human interaction is not limited to the impersonal contact we make with global corporations. Inside the corporation, relationships are increasingly automated and systematized. Managers are trained to use management systems to interface with their direct reports. Staff is no longer encouraged to be loyal to a manager, as that is as sensible as being loyal to the coffee machine. The manager is just an entity that inputs data into the management system.

The argument in favor of automation in the work place is it reduces errors and lowers costs, but often the driving force is to limit human interaction. The shift supervisor, so used to dealing with systems in his life, is unequipped to actually manage human beings on a personal level. Instead of monitoring their work and correcting their errors, adjusting for personality, he posts their efficiency reports in the break room, along with all of the other management metrics that come from the quality control system.

This is something people in the process management world have come to understand about the modern workplace. It’s not as much about efficiency as about the fact that young people no longer possess the social skills that were an assumed part of society just a couple of generations ago. The young manager does not have the social skills to confront an underling over an error or the intuition to encourage someone who needs a little motivation to get through a difficulty.

The general reputation of millennials in the work place is that they are self-absorbed, needy and entitled. Companies have responded to this with tighter structures that remove the need for initiative and adaptability. In reality, the cause of the problem is a generation of people raised by robots. The well-adapted millennials are those who played sports or served in the military. In those environments, stripped of automation, they learned how to be leaders, teammates and adapt to new conditions.

This is not just a workplace phenomenon. This post from the London School of Economics is amusing in many ways, but one line jumps out. “Occupational segregation matters because it can lead to inequality between workers and limit the talent pool for employers trying to fill a position.” The sterility of language will remind anyone over the age of 40 of the jokes made about communism. That’s a line that would seem at home in a provincial report on the latest five year plan.

This is something you see all over the social sciences. It’s why the author of the post claims, with a straight face, that economists are baffled as to why homosexuals are clustered into certain fields. Within living memory, people just knew why this was and did not think much about it. It was so obvious, it was assumed everyone knew it. In the atomized transactional world of today, humans are the most baffling thing to their fellow humans. No one knows anything about themselves now.

Part of this is the result of multiculturalism. That man brought here from a century ago would have been snatched from a world in which everyone was like him. If he was a city dweller, he may have bumped up against other tribes of immigrants or natives, but his daily life was spent around his people. What he knew about those other people was through the lens of his understanding of himself and his people. It was not through a description in a textbook or from a class on human development.

Today we live in a world of strangers. White communities have been shattered, along with the sense of community. In fact, whites are no longer permitted to have a sense of community. Since most of what makes the modern world possible is still run by whites, the result is a world run by deracinated strangers in a sea of alienation. Those management systems are simply a response to this reality. It’s a solution to slow what is the inexorable process of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism.

There’s also the fact that technology has not just made stuff cheaper. It has changed how humans interact with the world. This shows up in standardized testing. Young people are better at taking tests, because they live in a world of tests. Their games are structured along the same lines as a standardized test. Instead of a free form world of play, it is the range of options available in the video game. Instead of problem solving, it is leaning the combination of available inputs.

This transactional existence is not without its consequences. The alienation that is a daily part of modern life manifests as nostalgia throughout the culture. Hollywood movies are either based on childhood items, like super heroes, or remakes of shows from when America was not this way. The rising tide of populism and ethno-nationalism, particularly among the youth, is a romantic response to a modern world that offers plenty of ways to use your time, but no answer for how to live.

That’s what would most shock and horrify 19th century man about this age. He could live without the instant communications, but he could not live a life in which no one had anything to say or a reason to say it. He could live without modern transportation, but he could not live without a place to a go or a people to visit. He could not live alone in a world full of strangers. It’s all those close, smelly, sweaty connections with your people that makes you human. He could not live without that and in a probability, neither can we.

Support the media that supports you. While all of us toiling in the fields of dissident media are motivated by a sense of duty, having a place to sleep and food on the table still requires money. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I now have a PayPal setup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!